The Frontiers of Language and Nationality in Europe. Leon Dominian
About 200 B.C. Teutonic speech first attained the Rhine, having reached the river from the northeast.
Celtic became Romanized after the Roman conquest in the first century of our era. The lingua vulgaris used by the soldiers and traders sent to colonize the country gradually displaced native vernaculars. By the end of the fourth century Celtic as a language had practically disappeared from the entire country. The new Romance language had taken such strong root in the land that successful invaders of French soil were henceforth to adopt it and abandon their native tongue. Thus Visigoths, Burgundians and Franks who invaded Gaul in the fifth century forsook their own language and employed the speech of the people they had conquered. This was a result of the superior intellectual qualities of the conquered race. The Franks in particular, a Teutonic people, established themselves firmly enough in northern Gallo-Roman territory to confer the name of France to the whole region, although their endeavors to settle in southern France had been unsuccessful. It required fully six centuries for the language of the Roman colony of Gaul to become definitely differentiated from Latin. By the seventh century the idiom spoken in France was known as Romance or Romanic.
TABLE I
Distribution of Languages in Switzerland According to the Census of 1910
| Canton | German | French | Italian | Romansh | Others |
| Aargau | 222,571 | 1,532 | 6,197 | 72 | 389 |
| Appenzell A/R | 56,505 | 134 | 1,285 | 27 | 68 |
| Appenzell I/R | 14,469 | 32 | 97 | 4 | 6 |
| Basel City | 127,491 | 3,601 | 4,021 | 138 | 1,062 |
| Basel | 72,809 | 1,124 | 2,548 | 27 | 114 |
| Berne | 528,554 | 104,412 | 12,247 | 172 | 2,198 |
| Fribourg | 42,634 | 94,378 | 1,911 | 42 | 586 |
| Geneva | 17,456 | 120,413 | 12,641 | 196 | 5,058 |
| Glarus | 31,733 | 66 | 1,306 | 69 | 120 |
| Graubünden | 58,465 | 838 | 20,963 | 37,147 | 2,441 |
| Lucerne | 161,083 | 1,316 | 4,808 | 126 | 365 |
| Neuchâtel | 17,305 | 111,597 | 3,747 | 50 | 816 |
| Nidwalden | 13,329 | 31 | 319 | 5 | 6 |
| Obwalden | 16,738 | 66 | 330 | 28 | 23 |
| St. Gall | 282,722 | 1,099 | 17,584 | 456 | 967 |
| Schaffhausen | 43,795 | 379 | 1,712 | 18 | 193 |
| Schwyz | 56,311 | 258 | 1,612 | 64 | 60 |
| Soleurne | 111,373 | 2,818 | 2,570 | 21 | 179 |
| Tessin | 5,829 | 1,008 | 147,790 | 131 | 457 |
| Thurgau | 125,876 | 593 | 8,328 | 89 | 291 |
| Uri | 20,937 | 80 | 1,053 | 56 | 15 |
| Valais | 37,351 | 80,316 | 10,412 | 16 | 165 |
| Vaud | 34,422 | 264,222 | 16,694 | 220 | 8,194 |
| Zug | 26,406 | 217 | 1,454 | 26 | 71 |
| Zürich | 472,990 | 5,714 | 19,696 | 634 | 4,601 |
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